[inaudible conversations] >> and are you pleased to introduce dr. meredith wadman. she has an impressive career, received her ba in biology from stamp or come and be from oxford university where she was a rhodes scholar and a degree in journalism from columbia university. in addition she's written for "the new york times," "washington post" and the journal nature among others issues currently is that frederick heintz magazine. as an epidemiologist and a researcher in training i was excited to read the book, "the

vaccine race: science, politics, and the human costs of defeating disease. the centers for disease control and prevention considers that the number one public health achievement of the 20th century. indeed, vaccines have saved millions of lives it because of vaccinations for smallpox was eradicated and other diseases such as polio, rubella and evenr chickenpox are a thing of theech past. this book is not only the story of the great achievement of public health.ou it is also about the men, womena and children who help take these vaccines possible. throughout this book, contemporary interviews with key players bring the personalities of these important scientific individuals alive on the page. dr. wadman does not shy away from their comfortable truth embedded within the history of vaccine are not user. "the vaccine race" reminds us it is important that we learn from our past so that the story written in the future about how we solve the crisis of today as much more ethically grounded. perhaps the greatest praise that i can get this book, it is not

just for the vax technology greek. it is for those interested in american history and politics and those who champion the cause of social justice. we are very lucky she is here with us today. hope it will come to the stage dr. meredith wadman. [applause] >> thanks for the welcome. i'm so pleased to be here. s thanks especially to the gaithersburg book festival organizers. i can't think of a better way to spend a saturday than among people who love to read and write books. it is a tremendous honor to be here.nt i will start by telling a little bit about myself. i was born into a medical family.h my dad was a doctor and my mom is a public health nurse and we grow very much of the idea that vaccination was a good and important thing. but it wasn't until as a medical student i had a chance to go to south africa on a pediatric rotation is a major hospital for

laxer the apartheid era that i really came home to me in a really visceral way how lucky we were in our communities to be protected by many vaccines. this is a horribly overcrowded underfunded hospital sec for newborns printed an incubator and typically the hospital had a large area all over the problems of the talent by the time kids got there from the districts they were typically unvaccinated and all marriage and when you get the lack of vaccinations in combination with non-attrition method devastating bicoastal measles will cripple these kids invading their brains and often their lungs with ammonia. not advancing. any idea why? it did. my bad. this toddler had just died from measles that invaded his lungs for lack of a 29 cents vaccine.

i went on during medical school to realize that my college was m actually to be a writer and i was able to write an article about that hospital with afo newspaper that was a moment of truth for me worry that i am going to go on to journalism than i am going to be a medical writer and i've been lucky enough to do that in washington for 20 years. most of the time for nature, but more recently for science. a bit like going from the red sox to the yankees, but actually, we're all one big happy family and his journalism and there's lots of cross over. so why write a book called "the vaccine race" and what's it about? there is a lot in the book i'm going to speed along that touch on three major points. one is the self at the heart of this up were derived from an aborted feed if it used to make many, many vaccines. but most important is the rubella vaccine. that is the race at the heart oa the book before there was one in

the 1960s. finally, i will speak about some of the people who are oftenn abused in the race back the date, 60, 70 years ago to get new therapies and vaccines. how did i actually get darted on this project? it began with about come in many of you may be familiar with, and advanced in 1951 in which a 31-year-old largely illiterate, very poor african-american woman was dying of cervical cancer. doctors at johns hopkins took solved and they became a hugely important tool in medical research. she was unaware of this and the author of the book by rebecca's flute, spend a lot of time examining the impact of that on her family was left behind and i could not put the book down. i was foremost in my mind a couple years later when i came

across a letter to the editor of science magazine from someone called when a case like. he identified himself and said basically in this letter that i derived in 1962 from an aborted readers and they've been used to make vaccines that are protecten hundreds of millions of people. not only that, i got into a huge intellectual property fight in the 1970s about just want those cells that raise questions that are still unanswered todayn that letter just let off the page at me and very shortly thereafter, 84 at the time, by the way, today is the day of his 89th birthday and he's still going strong. anyway, i phoned him. i said something is a month-old story here. he said is there ever. shortly thereafter, i have to have a college reunion in california that is in california

knows that the visited at his home in northern california in years story from the beginning. dairy is in 2012 with his wife, ruth in california. he took me back down memory lane to displays that was an elegant brownstone on the university of pennsylvania campus. it was sort of a month-old man made in ensuring american anatomy without this horrible, anatomical specimens in the late 50s. and really at a time when the man in the middle was recruitedf to give the institute a new life.fe hillary koprowski with a larger than life character, an erudite polish and a grin to have escaped from hitler in the nick of time, fled with his young family.

he was in at the cure. he could quote rambo as easily as he could. he loved wine and women and song not necessarily in that order and he definitely looked down and american scientists as being just a bit colonial. and so, when he hired leonard who is about 30 years old, who was a working-classel philadelphian who broughtbo himself up at the bootstraps from a family who had nothing and worked his way through a phd in medical microbiology at the university of pennsylvania, they were let unanswered of a technician to serve up cells per experiment to the really outstanding biologist from all over the world that koprowski had by then. a flick with a bright guy, ambitious than he was not about to be made a second class citizen were stopped from doing

science. he wasn't just going to be a household survey. so what did he do? he began getting this is from abortions that were it across the street at the hospital of the university of pennsylvania. abortion was a criminal offense in every u.s. state in this era. in pennsylvania, there is not even an exception and the criminal law that would be okay to do an abortion to save the life of the mother. 10 years of hard labor, lots of fines.univ however, authorities but for major medical centers like the university of pennsylvania, where they could do a so-called medical therapeutic abortion justified adopters for.here'ss mysterious reasons, then they tolerated it. that is how he began to receive fetuses every event and he would grow fetal cells in lab dishes. it is an article of faith and belief in science at the time

but if you grew cells in lab dishes they should grow forever. they were immortal.he sci if they died as a script on the part of the scientist.sn someone had sneezed on the culture is in effect a bad for the nutritious broth used to endorse the cells were somehowo' deficient. when they started dying after several months, first the cells from the first bbc got started to get decrepit and die, then the next one, then the next. he thought he was growing up. he did all kinds of experiments. what was he doing wrong? you can see on the left those are young, healthy fetal cells from the young typically have an aborted fetus. on the right, old, overly in tht last stages of life. why were they dying? he finally saw with decades of scientists had not been, but now some lab dishes are his

borderless uri provided they are normal and not cancerous else by definition will grow forever. aborted fetal cells turn healthy, normal fetuses and thel were dying and he published a paper that said as much in took a huge amount of flak. that was 1961.h but that made his name.flak. it took years and years for his finding to be accepted. utah to any biologist today and they will know what the heyel flick limit about 50 subdivisions is also go through before they die if they arels normal cells in lab dishes. immediately when the paper was published, there is tremendous interest among scientists. they wanted to get a hold and do experiments on the normal biology of aging. the nih is equally as interested in the cells because they wanted to find scientists to look into the cells.

they had died by mistake. what was he going to do? the nih funded him to his dirt developing new cell lines.am a lot of money came from the nih under this contract. $120,000 a year in the mid-60s and tiny print in the contract said, this will be important, if you finish this contract, all the materials developed under it becomes the property of the federal government and they are ours to keep in you will have them back to us as per his action. hey hayflick -- you'll probably recall in 1955 the polio vaccine was introduced. it was the great public health victory at the area. the solid vaccine was produced in monkey kidney cells and it

became apparent throughout the 1950s the those monkey kidney cells harbored silent viruses. by the late 1950s, tens of millions of children in this country have been vaccinated with the salk vaccine and some of the silent monkey viruses were in the vaccine it up to 30 million children are exposed to monkey viruses that it penetrated the vaccine. it had been killed by farmout died in the vaccine, the same fermata hyades to kill the virus. they were walking around. they seemed perfectly healthy is the regulators did not worry too much. quick review of high school biology, viruses are basically a piece of genetic material surrounded by a protein coat. o on their own they are inert. they don't eat, sleep, drink, have sex, move around or anything else. they must invade cells in order to reproduce themselves are a virus but invade a cell,

hijacked machinery can i make copies of itself and those copies first out of the cell. that is how viruses replicate. when you want to make a viral vaccine coming you need valve has essentially many vaccines that are used to make thes. vaccine, diocese of monkey kidney cells to make the vaccine. on the left, and unsung of 20th century medicine in my opinion, bernice eddy came from a town of less than 200 in virginia, worked her way through her phd at the university of cincinnati and discovered in 1960 that the monkey kidney cells and used to make the polio vaccine harbored a particular monkey virus that caused a uniformly fatal cancer in her laboratory hamsters. she alerted her bosses. she was silenced. she was demoted. she was finally put to work in what had been a supply room with one staffer. she just put up with the punishment. she had amazing gain power.

the only newspaper that paid attention to this news while tha mainstream but the national enquirer, which in effect got the story right. yes, there was the polio vaccine coverup. yes, there was this particular virus in the salk vaccine and no one knew when the long term would i do in terms of causing cancer. was very clear that cause cancer and soon it was clear that if you scrape cells remain human beings cheek it would also cause cancer in those. regulators got worried. they move to another monkey species in 19 to three for producing polio vaccine goinghea forward. hayflick looked at all of this and thought what the heck, why don't we get cells from one clean, normal few days and they will multiply in the lab and we can use them. we will know they are safe and we can dispense with importing hundreds of thousands of monkeys and bothering them, which was an

expensive nasty business anyway. meet mrs. acts. hayflick needed source of an aborted fetus were he to go back and get the medical history. the surgeons at the universitye of then you didn't care about his work.bu it was a pain in the for them. hayflick needed someone who wonders to vaccine making. direct connection was able to contact the institute in stockholm where abortion was legal and to obtain an aborted fetus or mrs. acts who was in 1962 a mother of several children with the heads and heo wasn't too much use. he was often out of town for manual labor. he wasn't much help when it is around. an alcoholic with a criminal record. could not face another child. however, although it's legal to get an abortion, it was not easy. many doctors would perform them and by the time mrs. acts found a swedish gynecologist who agree to perform the abortion, she was

four months pregnant. i'll tell you about her if anyone's interested but i'm trying to race ahead here. after the abortion, defeatist, a female was wrapped in a sterile green cloth and transported to the tune in stockholm are the lots were dead and flown to philadelphia where hayflick was waiting for them. in the summer of 1962 as social changes coming in the u.s., the spring was published. many other events where if a awl period hayflick -- hayflick spent at hot summer deriving the cells. he named them from the fetus. ct he created 800 of these tiny and shows that the cells. each had two to 3 million cells and it. h. had the potential to divide another 40 times.

if you do the math, you realize it's simply one bottle of about $10 million will produceon 22 million pounds of cells. for practical purposes, hayflick had created a supply of cells is infinite, especially when you realize when you freeze themp south, that can fuel cells, whether sought out a year later, decade later for 50 years later, the cells will begin dividing again. t they will remember how many times they divided before they were frozen and will continue to roughly 50 division. merck will still use the sauce today from files like this one by hayflick laid down in the summer of 1952. hayflick was excited about the cells. all kinds of lab tests. it is clear that the cells wereh clean and safe. in fact, they interviewed mrs. acts several months after

the abortion to make sure theyus were free of disease anded tha cancers. this is how she rudely learned that in fact her fetus had been taken.is she provided a medical history that made clear there were no problems of health and her history. hayflick then ran into someone who is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. this guy, rod murray, very smart harvard educated physician and expert in virology. but he had been in the south pacific with u.s. medical court in 1942 when there is a terrible accident with yellow feverit vaccine. tens of thousands of military men were in fact it with hepatitis e. they had mistakenlv infected this yellow fever vaccine, up to 150 died. marie witnessed this at close quarters and probably put the fear of god in him. about 13 years later when the salk vaccine was first rolled

out, the safety division he saw what was called the cutter incident unfold for a company laboratories of california produce elks vaccine that had five polio virus in it.ed a 192 people are paralyzed in 10 died. o there had to be a recall of thes vaccine. a terrible situation. i went to the secretary of health and human services was fired. he was moved into his office position and he became the chief vaccine regulator for the entire united states. he was in the nih because at the time that is where vaccine regulation resided. it was only later moved to fda. marie was terribly slow to make decisions, was very conservative and did not want to make changes unless he was absolutely forced to do. when he looked at hayflick steel cells, he was afraid they were going to cause cancer.

even as european companies in european critical trial people make measles, polio and other vaccines were completely stymied. i will take a right turn, but i promise i'll come back to the storyline. 1960 for a massive rubella epidemic in the united states was historic. rubella, also known as german measles is a mild disease you can expect a theater, might have a few swollen lymph node, might have a rash or you might notot know you are in fact did. however, if a pregnant woman gets rubella, it is devastating on the fetus. unlike zito which affects pregnancies in about 15%, redoubtable damage virtually every fetus in the first trimester between 90% and 100%. you can imagine in the mid-to this rubella epidemic with no n vaccine available in 1960 or,

women were terrified and many, many were affect the diet. more than 20,000 babies were born either blind, and have come intellectually disabled the shrunken head like you see with this sub 10 babies. u that heart defects, combinations of conditions in an unknown number of other women to 5000 chose to terminate their pregnancies because of the epidemic. they couldn't be sure they have rubella. aal it is all very scary. those are pictures that tiny rubella virus particles moving between cells. when rubella infects the fetusus that affects virtually every fetal organ. one of the outcomes of cataracts this is stephen windsor who was born during the 1964-65 epidemic line, death was hurt defects. he is pictured here at e.g.

interest in the plot can too worked up the stairs and around the corner at the institute. like hayflick he was a self-made man and the growth in the bronx but not two pennies to rub together, worked his way through medical school, almost shut out because he was jewish, ernie new york state fellowship which meant it could not turn him down for medical school. he had his heart set on making vaccines. he had stimulated hillary couldd pass these who had been a polio vaccine pioneer and decided in the midst of this epidemic that he was going to do something about it. it argued that work in britain where the epidemic hit a year earlier so he knew what he did to babies. he returned to philadelphia in 1964 as the epidemic descended and soon became known is the only doctor in philadelphia who could run a very lengthy and ponderous but has philatelic pregnant woman if she had been affected. besieged with a woman in couples

and can i please have the bloode test. when the test was positive in a family chose to abort, he asked them, could i receive the fetus from the abortion because i'm trying to isolate rubella virus from that he does. and grow it in the hayflickpt cells which he promptly did. he received 31 fetuses in the course of the calendar year 1964. speed is number 27 from which he captured rubella virus that were particularly well in the cell. that is just a sense of the a anxiety that women experience. the cover of life magazine in june 1965. plotkin was against the competition as he sat up again to vaccine. many major drug companies saw what the market was going to be for this vaccine. every woman of childbearing age around the world would want this vaccine plus probably regulators who recommended for young

children said they would mix those mothers. mark was involved. mclean trench was was involved. another sophisticated knowledge and company. so plotkin was this scientist but he was also very stubborn and determined. when he developed the vaccine, he did with virtually all of his colleagues did in those days. he found a powerless institution wide population on which to test it. he went to the archbishop of philadelphia which owned and operated an orphanage in southwest philadelphia and the vaccine took place on one and two year in this orphanage pictured here. i'm going to pause to read you a little bit from the book about what the orphanage was like. am i projecting alright? i feel like the microphone isn't exactly ideal. please waive that fee if you are not hearing me.

st. vincent for children at 6900 green light avenue is made of, red brick and took up most of a city block. two symmetrical wings were marked by long rows of rectangular windows. crowd was so impressed is for the roman catholic archdiocese of philadelphia owned and operated for many called the st. vincent home and orphanage, not all parents who lived there in november in 64 were dead. some are destitute or in jail or heading that way. unmarried girls and young women who had been forced to give up young children for adoption. there is a maternity hospital for unwed mothers and when those babies are born if they weren't adopted in the first year, they were passed across a link to the orphanage. many were black or mixed race children who weren't adopted. sidestep st. vincent home halt by a charred care workers who

dressed and fed the toddlers, change diapers, played with them, they had come assembly line fashion.ks there were also two stray dogs in a grumpy made man and mr. medina. the nuns belong to the missionary sisters and more from a practical habit whose wifeos sleeps more than one pound this way during diaper changing. they live in simple rooms on the floor and a warship in a small chapel on the ground floor. the rest of the lower two floors house to chill dread. .. with tiny toilets. the nuns tried to make up in love what building left physical warmth making sure they got out on playground reading to them and walking to the park. still the nuns worried about the children sister a pit petite

every one of them needed adult or two to belong to. a level of care and attention she couldn't possibly provide. there were crushing mommies. days that foster family arrived to take one boy away and he unraveled in a desperate scream and whales. the unforgettable lost look that a nun named sister mary chose to observe on presidents face of a deaf girl e discovered that a present that john joseph kroal handed to her at the annual christmas party a at a downtown hotel was, in fact, just a decoration and empty box. it was from the ball the spectacle kroal, that plot got a green light to study his new rubella vaccine in the children living at st. vincent's home. in his letter requesting cole's permission did not explain to the archbishop that he captured virges from aborted fetus an

grown it in cells from another. he was passionately antiabortion. in 1973 he would call the state criminal abortion laws, quote, an unspeakable tragedy for this nation that set in motion events that are unspeakable to contemplate. in 1964 the archbishop gave the rubella study the go ahead. i will stop there. i had thought this was to be a a 50-minute talk. so i understand it would be 40. i will have to move along quickly. basically plotkin was outgunned by merck and others through political favoritism won approval for their rubellala vaccines in 1969. rubella epidemics came around six or seven years. so there was a tremendous race to get a rubella vaccine before

1970, when the next epidemic was expected. in 1969 the u.s. vaccine regulators approved threere pharmaceutical company manufactured vaccines. plotkin was left out in the cold. it emerged however because of one woman, dorothy horseman, first chairwoman of pediatrics at yale who went to bat for plotkin's vaccine, paid closetu attention to the studies on it that his vaccine was better t generated better level of antibodies and fewer side-effects. she didn't take no for an answer tremendously respected and also tremendously powerful and she told him in no uncertain terms, maurice, you guys at merck have to drop inferior vaccine and start making plotkin's vaccine. maurice was a profane guy so i

can't tell you what he told her, eventually he agreed. to this day as from 1979, that first box of mmr vaccine, the r being the rubella component, measles and mumps being m and m. merck manufactured, with the rubella vaccine. this to this day the vaccine protects four million babies injected with it each other. it is also exported to 40 other countries. it is there doubt that iten prevented tens of abortions and feet tall abnormalities to this day -- fetal. the first vaccine was made that the cells derived in 1962, was finally approved in 1972 by u.s. regulators. how did this happen? 1972, rod murray was pushed out

of the job as u.s. vaccine regulator. and vaccine regulation was moved to fda. this polio virus became the first polio vaccine on the market made with w -- wi-38 cells. what happened to hayflick? by 1968 he was tired of being treated i as a second-class citizen and rest of the biologists and he found himself a better job at stanford. does that remind you of him. kaprosky had designed, hang on,. kaprosky had designs on the wi-38 sells. by 1968 plotkin made the rubella vaccine.

the cells were there in the bottom of the institute.nstitu koporoski wrote a letter to burros, you have a patented recipe for the rubella vaccine. i have the all the cells you need to make it. let's make a deal. he showed the letter to hayflick. hayflick said over my dead body. can prosky didn't have the courtesy to know about this. after hayflick saw the letter, he went to the bear. of the institute. he packed all of the remaining 400 odd vials of cells into a portable liquid nitrogen

refrigerator which looks like 100-pound bomb without the wings, strapped into the back seat of the four-door family sedan, put his kids in the other seat and drove 3,000 miles to california via the grand canyon and other destinations. and nih was fit to be tied. can pros ski even more so, camping i will call it with the cells was discovered. however nothing was done about it until hayflick who had been handing cells out for free decided to set up a company in the early '70s.in he began selling cells including to merck.. he signed a contract with merck, once merck decided to switch to plotkin's rubella vaccine, that would be worth one million dollars to him personally had it been executed. shortly after he signed it, the nih heard and got wind he wasd selling the cells and sent out the chief investigator of waste,

fraud and abuse, a no-nonsense guy james shriver to investigate.e. he resigned under pressure from stanford and spent many years in the academic wilderness. i think his colleague stan plotkin really put it so accurately when he said the science, hayflick went to public, this is brokerage youre did i. this man who at height of his powers brought about his own downfall. that is the front page of "new york times" on march of 1976 where one of headlines says,. [ih says investigators, investigator sold cells owned by the united states. hayflick spent many years redeeming his reputation. if you talk to anyone today what they will know about is the hayflick limit, very important discovery of cellular mortality. they will not be aair probably of his really difficult interval

in the mid-1970s. they also won't be aware of tremendous contribution he made to getting many cellular factories into circulation for making viral vaccines. the british imitated his method and produced another fetal cell line mrc-5 in 1966. between these two cell lines, more than six billion doses of vaccines against all of these diseases, measles, rabies, hepatitis, chicken pox, shingles and polio have been made.s and e this year over 60 or 50 vaccinated against shingles, you've been vaccinated with a vaccine made from the wi-38 cells. hayflick fought the u.s. in court for five years 1976 to '81.

the government said times was changing. axe dem i can scientists were asked to do a 180-degree turn to stop being servants for the common good and start looking out for the next commercial opportunity because there was a law came in 1980 that said, institutions could own intellectual property even if it was done by investigators funded at their institutions by the u.s. government. in other words, they were pulled or encouraged to become entrepreneurs. given this 1980, it was hard for the nih to keep prosecuting hayflick. they settled with him and under the terms of the settlement he was allowed to keep six am fuels of the wi-38 cells. rest returned to government. many are still speaking under 24/7 surveillance at the american tight culture collection. hayflick get six ampules in his garage in california. liquid nitrogen has to be topped out for from time to time.

every years he would drive bark and forth to santa rosa to buy liquid nitro again. he decided already, said these cells are like my children. it is time, my children should leave home. and he sent them off to cell repository in camden, new jersey mrs. x never saw a penny from the cells which have made drugmakers, particularly merck many, many billions of dollars through the rubella vaccine. that's much echo of the henrietta story. i will be glad to take questions on that piece or anything else you have to talk about. i will open it up for questions now. [applause] >> i have a question that is both on and off topic. you referenced earlier the infected kidney cells affected

rhesus monkeys. what is your thought about the theory floated around for a while, one reason africa was epsy center for hiv because they had been invaccinated with these infected vaccinations? >> there is big controversy about that at the turn of the century. they actually went back to the original polio vaccine stocks used and found absolutely no trace of hiv or anything that would implicate those vaccines and causing hiv. in fact the royal society in britain did a long study and public proceeding. that has really been completely debunked. there is, that is not where hiv came from. sorry? >> [inaudible] not where it came from -- >> yeah. not contributing factor. i'm also happy to talk about current-day vaccine politics that is on anyone's mind. in interviews i have had lots of

questions about that. yes? >> with abortion legal now it seems that it would be relatively simple to get new cell lines. is that being pure you sued? you talked only like there were two magic cell lines. just seems like any competent pharmaceutical company can create a new cell line whenever they wanted? >> right. there is a two-part answer to that did everyone hear the question? one is vaccine technology in many ways has gone past using whole cells producing vaccines. they use little snippets of dna often now. it's a bit of, not an antiquated technology but one you wouldn't really think of using going forward by and large. the other thing, sort of a matter, if it ain't broke don't fix it. there is long, long experience with these vaccines made using

these cells, cells, like people have their own particular personalities and characteristics in the lab if you're very, very familiar with a cell line, you don't want to stop and start over using another one because there is huge literature and huge experience accumulated around that cell line. that being said the chinese just last year, a chinese company derived a new aborted fetal cell line because they wanted their own source of human fetal cells for vaccine-making. so it is done but not frequently. there is still lots and lots of wi-38 and lots of mrc in particular on hand. yes? >> did people get cancer from that vaccines? are people getting cancer today? >> i was wondering are people getting cancer from the salt vaccine line? those people are probably in their 60s now i would think. >> that is exactly right. anyone vaccinated between 1955

and '61 are possibly in the pool. the institute of medicine did exhaustive study on that published in 2001. what they concluded it is highly unlikely, absolutely can't be ruled out because the studies weren't done at the time epdeem logically that would be able to answer that question. there is a dearth of data that can definitely answer that question but the bottom line was, that it seems very unlikely. >> thank you. >> if you're interested in getting a lot more information about that question and the whole virus and vaccine there is a book called "the virus and the vaccine" published 10 years ago has chapter and verse. it also has a very different knit point of view. so debbie bokgen is the first

author on that book. yes? >> [inaudible] where do we stand currently in race for ebola vaccine? >> i think it is be to be deployed in the democratic republic of congo, one candidate. it hasn't been approved but there is an outbreak as we speak. the move is, may come any day to put that candidate vaccine into use. it is thought to be effective. i'm not right up to speed where the other ebola candidates are. there has no the been one licensed i can tell you that much but i know there are several candidates. >> thank you for all of the research that you've put into this. i'm wondering why the myth about vaccines and autism have

persisted despite the scientific evidence? and why the so-called anti-vaxers still have a strong sway over a certain portion of the population when the scientific consensus is that these vaccines do not cause autism? >> right. s that is a really good question. a lot of people ask themselves i think in part it's, part of a mentality right now that is common across issues including global warming where distrust of authority, distrust of expertise , questioning of facts exist. i think that is some of it but i also think there is a deep human need, if your child has autism, you want to, you want to know there is a reason, a cause. you want to be able to tell a story about what caused it to happen.

we don't know is not tremendously satisfying. i think unfortunately because the age of childhood vaccination is coincident, simultaneous by and large with the time that autism symptoms start to manifest, it is very easy as a distressed parent to say a leads to b. when you have fraudsters like andrew wakefield out promoting that. not to mention he ththat's been thrown out of the medical profession and the paper in lancet has been retracted. doesn't really matter looking for a story, someone was once a authority telling thaw store, it does something psychically. i can't really explain it. but i do is really important not to be dismissive or patronizingg of people that are coming from that point of view because i just think that makes people dig in even harder. that there he needs to be empathy and listening and, then,

maybe education and evidence. but starting with the listening and the empathy. does anyone wonder about misovax. -- mrs. x? i was able to discover mrs. x was still living in 2013 with sweden. in conversation with my translator, she didn't want wano be interviewed and be a closed chapter in her life. she did say they did this without my knowledge and that would never be allowed today. yes? >> given that there is a discussion and importance of it today, especially with the henrietta x becoming forefront with the hbo movie, have you seen the hbo movie? >> i have. >> do you think it did justice

to the issue at hand there? >> the movie was a movie. it was made-for-tv and i thought oprah did a tremendous acting job but you couldn't get in the movie the whole backstory about the cells and their use and it was meant to be a drama. that is what it was. i would recommend anyone who saw the movie and is intrigued, thee book is much richer and offers a lot more. that is often the case with books versus movies i would say. >> i read it three times, so. >> yes? >> this is a comment more than a question, but a couple of months ago i started working up at johns hopkins and i work with quite a number about african-american people who are incredibly well-educated and still have fears about visiting certain parts of that hospital. i mean the effect of that is, it is not just the community that lives around the hospital.

it is just huge how much damage that did.age th >> yeah. >> the story you said you would tell us about the other women scientist and tarnished and relegated to the lab? >> yeah. what did i say? >> you said you would tell us what happened to her? >> well she just persisted in her research and worked at the nih.h. i believe she was retired when she was 70. she gave a history what happened 10 years earlier before she passed away. i was greatly admired of her, she would not be turned aside and i'm told it is time. thank you very much for attending. [applause] >> here is look at authors recently featured on booktv's "after words," our weekly author interview program. stuart taylor